Television: Trouble Is On the Air

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Unfortunately, Pompeii tells its story using clumsy re-enactments and a script that spews clich??s like magma ("Trouble is brewing in paradise"). The drama is not just cornball but also insulting, as if the famed catastrophe wouldn't hold our interest without bad-soap dialogue--"The gods have decided to kill us all!"-- and a bombastic portrayal of Pliny the Elder (Tim Pigott-Smith). After the real-life pictures of loss in South Asia, the re-enactments seem even more cheap, phony and inadequate.

Of course, Pompeii's makers could not have anticipated the comparison. But as VSDMs remind us, bad things happen, and you had better be ready.